Food

You're finally ready to make that first pie. You find a recipe with an accompanying picture of a perfect, gorgeous pie, and you plunge right in. You follow the recipe, yet somehow everything turns out wrong. The crust is like cardboard or sand. There is no flakiness, and it tastes terrible, like...

Your kitchen is lightly dusted with flour, the bowls of ripe fruit are ready to be translated into filling, or maybe a pot of Meyer lemon curd or melted Valrhona stands on the stove. The fruit and curd and chocolate are all things that can go into the glorious pie you're making. But how much thought...

Beer, Wine and Cocktails

The harvest is on in the Napa Valley. And it’s one of the earliest in recent memory. How early? About a week ahead of last year, when picking started on July 30. The year before, it began on Aug. 1; and in 2012, when picking didn’t begin until mid-August, according to Patsy McGaughy of the Napa...